Challenges and Opportunities in the Software Process Improvement in

Small and Medium Enterprises: A Field Study

Gledston Carneiro da Silva and Glauco de Figueiredo Carneiro

Salvador University (UNIFACS), Bahia, Brazil

Keywords:

Software Quality, Software Process Improvement, Small and Medium Enterprises, Field Study.

Abstract:

The characteristics and proﬁles of organizations are important issues for the planning of their software process

improvement. It supports the alignment with organizational culture as well as with the consolidation of best

practices already implemented. This paper presents the results of a ﬁeld study to identify the perception of

the industry about challenges and opportunities of software process improvement faced by Small and Medium

Enterprises. This ﬁeld study aimed at identifying the proﬁle and perception of a group of software development

ﬁrms concerning software process improvement. The results indicated a list of challenges and activities faced

and performed by the companies toward the software process improvement journey.

1 INTRODUCTION

The term SME stands for Small and Medium Enter-

prises and covers a wide range of deﬁnitions and mea-

sures, varying from country to country and between

the sources reporting SME statistics (Ayyagari et al.,

2007). Some of the commonly used criteria to iden-

tify these companies are the number of employees,

total net assets, sales and investment level. However,

the most common deﬁnition is based on the number of

employees. A large number of sources deﬁne an SME

to have a cut-off range of 0-250 employees (Ayyagari

et al., 2007).

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are funda-

mental for the economy of the majority of countries.

In countries such as United States, Brazil, Canada,

China and India, companies with this proﬁle have sig-

niﬁcant representativeness in the economy. For this

reason, an effective Software Process Improvement

(SPI) should take into account difﬁculties inherent to

this type of organization (Dyb

a, 2005).

This paper presents the results of a ﬁeld study

focused on SMEs to answer the following research

questions: i) What are the main features, challenges

and difﬁculties faced by SMEs that work in software

development towards software process improvement?

and ii) What are the possibilities to support those or-

ganizations to overcome these difﬁculties and to en-

courage them to embrace the SPI journey?

The next sections of this paper are organized as

follows. Section 2 presents related works. In Section

3 we brieﬂy present the insights acquired during pre-

liminary research, namely when we conducted a Sys-

tematic Literature Review (SLR) to ﬁnd out evidences

in the literature about difﬁculties faced by SMEs dur-

ing the SPI journey (Silva and Carneiro, 2016). Sec-

tion 4 discusses the results of a ﬁeld study to charac-

terize the proﬁle and perception of a set of Brazilian

SMEs to compare them with results presented in the

SLR (Silva and Carneiro, 2016). Section 5 presents

ﬁnal remarks.

2 RELATED WORKS

In a pilot search for secondary studies using the

strings (Systematic Literature Reviews OR SLR)

AND (SPI OR software process improvement) on the

repositories Digital Library ACM, IEEE Xplore, Sci-

ence Direct and Google Scholar, we found ﬁve Sys-

tematic Literature Reviews (SLR) that are somehow

related to our two research questions (Pino et al.,

2008)(Lavall

ee and Robillard, 2012)(Bjørnson and

Dingsøyr, 2008)(Unterkalmsteiner et al., 2012)(Su-

layman and Mendes, 2011).

Pino and colleagues (Pino et al., 2008) published

in 2008 a systematic literature review to identify re-

ports and studies focusing on efforts of SMEs in the

software process improvement journey. The main

goal of their paper was to analyze approaches of SPI

related to these type of organizations. According to

the same authors, the following items can inﬂuence

448

Silva, G. and Carneiro, G.

Challenges and Opportunities in the Software Process Improvement in Small and Medium Enterprises: A Field Study.

In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2016) - Volume 1, pages 448-455

ISBN: 978-989-758-187-8

on the success of SPI adoption in SMEs: (a) hire ex-

pert advice on software process improvement; (b) ac-

quire ﬁnancial support to fund the software process

improvement; (c) establish cooperation among orga-

nizations interested in software process improvement

so that they can share resources; (d) perform a gap

analysis; (f) establish and institutionalize a communi-

cation plan considering all stakeholders; (g) motivate

senior management sponsorship and strong commit-

ment of all stakeholders. In this paper, we considered

papers published until December 2015 and also difﬁ-

culties and challenges faced by the companies. More-

over, we compared the obtained results with the ones

collected in the ﬁeld study.

Lavallee and Robillard (Lavall

ee and Robillard,

2012) published in 2012 a systematic literature re-

view to identify papers that focused on the impact of

SPI on developers. Among the positive impacts au-

thors identiﬁed the reduction in the number of crises,

and increase in team communications and morale, as

well as better requirements and documentation. On

the other hand, as negative impacts they mention the

increased overhead on developers through the need to

collect data and compile documentation, an undue fo-

cus on technical approaches, and the fact that SPI is

oriented toward management and process quality, and

not towards developers and product quality. Our work

did not consider only the developers perspective, but

the perspective of the company as a whole.

In (Unterkalmsteiner et al., 2012), the authors

identiﬁed and characterized evaluation strategies and

measurements used to assess the impact of different

SPI initiatives. The systematic literature review con-

ducted by the authors included 148 papers published

between 1991 and 2008. Seven distinct evaluation

strategies were identiﬁed, whereas the most common

one, Pre-Post Comparison, was applied in 49% of the

inspected papers. Quality was the most measured at-

tribute (62%), followed by Cost (41%) and Schedule

(18%). Despite these strategies have also been used

to evaulated SPI in SMEs, this SLR did not focused

exclusively in these types of companies. Thereby, the

authors did not mentioned if these strategies are effec-

tive for them. The results of this work corroborate the

importance of strategies for the success of software

process improvement, and we considered this fact in

the analysis of the results of this paper.

According to Google Scholar, among these four

systematic reviews, (Bjørnson and Dingsøyr, 2008)

had the largest number of citations. It was pub-

lished in 2008 and reports a systematic literature

review of empirical studies of knowledge manage-

ment in software engineering. Among the se-

lected primary studies, there are three publications

(Basri S, 2011)(Baskerville R, 1999)(C.G.v. Wangen-

heim, 2006) that discuss the use of knowledge man-

agement approaches to support software process im-

provement in SMEs. The focus of selected papers re-

ported in (Bjørnson and Dingsøyr, 2008) is not only

on SMEs, however the three studies reveal the impor-

tance of these companies in the overall context of SPI

(Silva and Carneiro, 2016).

In accordance to the SLR published in 2011 (Su-

layman and Mendes, 2011), very few studies (only

eight) have speciﬁcally focused on SPI for Web com-

panies, despite the large number of existing Web com-

panies worldwide, and the even larger number of Web

applications being currently developed. The selected

studies did not suggest any customized model or tech-

nique to measure the SPI of small and medium Web

companies. The measures of success for small and

medium Web companies, as per SR results, include

development team and client satisfaction, increase in

productivity, compliance with standards and overall

operational excellence. In addition to the limited

number of papers (eight studies), the authors did not

addressed difﬁculties and challenges faced by these

companies. In order to be successful in the SPI jour-

ney they also need to know beforehand possible pit-

falls of such adoption. Moreover, the SLR step of this

work was based only on eight papers.

3 INSIGHTS FROM A PREVIOUS

SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE

REVIEW

This section presents some of the results of a SLR

conducted by the authors and published at (Silva and

Carneiro, 2016). We aimed to answers the following

research question (RQ) by conducting a methodolog-

ical review of existing research: What are the chal-

lenges and difﬁculties faced by SMEs in the adoption

of software process improvement?

The knowledge of these challenges and difﬁculties

support the SMEs to plan and perform SPI alignment

with expectations and organizational culture of these

companies.

We conducted the SLR in journals and confer-

ences. We extracted 33 peer-reviewed literature pa-

pers published from January 2004 to June 2015 (in-

clusive). Based on the research question, keywords

were extracted and used to search the primary study

sources. The search string is presented as follows

and used the same strategy cited in (Chen and Babar,

2011): (challenges OR difﬁculties) AND (small and

medium enterprises OR sme) AND (SPI OR software

Challenges and Opportunities in the Software Process Improvement in Small and Medium Enterprises: A Field Study

449

process improvement)

Potentially Relevant Studies. Results obtained from

the automatic search and manual search were in-

cluded on a single spreadsheet: an overall total of 56

results, namely 54 from the automated search plus 02

from the separate manual search. The studies were

sorted by title in order to eliminate redundancies.

Studies for which the title, author(s), year and abstract

were identical were considered redundant. Forty six

papers remained after removing the redundant items.

Figure 1: Systematic Literature Review Phases in Numbers

(Silva and Carneiro, 2016).

Selection Process. The selection process ended up

with 36 papers from which we could obtain evidences

to answer the research question. Figure 2 depicts the

temporal distribution of the selected studies. As can

be observed, more than 97% of the papers were pub-

lished after 2006, including this year. This is an evi-

dence that the research on software process improve-

ment in small and medium enterprises has been gain-

ing increasing interest from the international software

engineering community. At the end, 36 papers were

considered relevant to answer the research question

(RQ). Table 1 presents an overview of the selection

process per public data source (Silva and Carneiro,

2016).

Table 1: Selection Process Overview per Public Data

Source (Silva and Carneiro, 2016).

Public Data

Source

Result

Relevant

Studies

Effectiveness

IEEE 338 19 5,6%

ACM 92 02 2,1%

SCOPUS 100 03 3%

GOOGLE 114 11 9,6%

We sorted the top ten papers in descending or-

der according to their respective citation number in

Google Scholar

. The paper M33

had the largest

number of citations and reports a systematic litera-

ture review of empirical studies of knowledge man-

agement in software engineering. Among the selected

primary studies, there are ﬁve publications (M24,

M30, M33) that discuss the use of knowledge man-

agement approaches to support software process im-

provement in SMEs. Despite the selected papers of

this SLR do not focus only on these types of compa-

nies, these studies are evidences of its importance in

the overall context of SPI.

Figure 2: Timeline Distribution of Papers (Silva and

Carneiro, 2016).

Characteristics, Challenges and Difﬁculties faced

by SMEs towards SPI Adoption. The selected stud-

ies show evidences of peculiarities regarding SMEs,

indicating the necessity of speciﬁc approaches and

solutions for an effective software process improve-

ment adoption. This is especially evident when com-

paring this scenario with large organizations. Factors

related to ﬁnancial restrictions and human resource

constraints (Challenge 1) were cited in 24 papers of

the 36 of the SLR (M01-M07, M10, M12-M17, M19,

M22-M24, M26, M28, M29, M31, M32 and M36),

representing 67% of the selected papers (Silva and

Carneiro, 2016). It is worth to mention that this does

not only refers to direct costs (external consulting and

training, for example), but also to indirect costs such

as effort required by the team to implement SPI, time

required by the teams to understand the SPI rationale

and the promote the several required adjustments dur-

ing the SPI adoption. Due to the ﬁnancial restric-

tions, many companies have applied for funding for

such end. Typical SMEs project characteristics was

the second most cited issue in 14 papers (M01, M03,

M04, M07, M11, M12, M14, M15, M17, M19, M20,

M27, M28 e M33), i.e. 39% of the selected primary

The list with the top ten papers as well as

the selected papers of this SLR are available at

http://www.sourceminer.org/slrsme.html.

Also available in the same url indicated above.

ICEIS 2016 - 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

450

studies pointed out this fact. Due to the the ever

changing business and customer demands, projects

with short time frame (Challenge 2) are also a typ-

ical characteristic of SMEs, especially for the ones

that focus on the evolution of software products of a

given domain (Silva and Carneiro, 2016).

The third issue highlighted by the selected stud-

ies is small teams with work overload - (Challenge

3) (Silva and Carneiro, 2016). This issue was cited

by nine papers (M01-M03, M08, M12, M14, M15,

M20 and M31), corresponding to 25% of the selected

studies. Small teams in SMEs should be taken into

account when planning the software process improve-

ment. In this case, participants of the teams can take

different roles depending on the demand. There are

roles such as quality auditor that can not be assumed

by the team members due to conﬂict of interest. In

this case, an external professional can provide an on-

demand service for this purpose.

Low focus on process - (Challenge 4) is an ev-

idence provided by eight papers (M01, M03, M08,

M12, M14, M15, M19 and M36), corresponding to

22% of the selected papers. It reveals how SMEs

deal with daily development practices. This means

that organizations can be subjected to conduct soft-

ware projects in a non-coordinated way and the teams

involved in the software projects are not always con-

cerned with software process improvement (Silva and

Carneiro, 2016). Limited number of customers -

(Challenge 5) is another issue pointed out by seven

(M01, M03, M06, M07, M12, M15 and M22) (19%)

of the selected studies. These type of companies need

to maintain the relationship with their clients, other-

wise the company can suffer the consequences of the

competitors.

Agility to deal with requirements volatility -

(Challenge 6) was an issue identiﬁed in six papers

(M01, M03, M07, M15, M18 and M34) correspond-

ing to 17% of the selected studies. Even after vali-

dating the requirements with the client, change in re-

quirements are inevitable. Responding to these de-

mands is crucial to keep clients satisﬁed. Absence of

training focusing on process - (Challenge 7) was also

identiﬁed in six papers (M03, M08, M12, M14, M19

and M35) corresponding to 17% of the selected stud-

ies.

Protection of intellectual property - (Challenge 8)

also corresponds to 17% of the selected studies (M06,

M24, M25, M30, M33 and M35) and has the poten-

tiality to encourage companies and their teams to in-

novate in new products, new techniques or approaches

that can lead to market differential. The next issues

are difﬁculty to include best practices- (Challenge 9),

mentioned in ﬁve studies (M01, M12, M14, M19 and

M36) and high cost of SPI qualiﬁed professionals -

Challenge 10 - reported in studies M02, M05, M11,

M13 and M34 (Silva and Carneiro, 2016). The results

of this SLR were used as reference for the ﬁeld study

presented in the next section.

4 FIELD STUDY IN SMALL AND

MEDIUM ENTERPRISES

This sections presents the results of a ﬁeld study

to characterize the perception of Small and Medium

Enterprises (SMEs) from Feira de Santana city of

State of Bahia in Brazil. The reason for having cho-

sen this city was the perceived number of organiza-

tions willing to implement software process improve-

ment practices, despite not having any company of-

ﬁcially adopted a well-known software process refer-

ence model such as CMMI (Chrissis et al., 2011) or

MPS.BR (Montoni et al., 2009). This was considered

an appropriate scenario to perform the ﬁeld study, to

collect and analyze data as well as to compare them

with the ﬁndings obtained in the Systematic Litera-

ture Review already conducted by the authors (Silva

and Carneiro, 2016) and brieﬂy presented in the pre-

vious section.

4.1 Planning and Execution

We contacted 30 companies from Feira de Santana

city. Eleven companies agreed to take part in the

study. We conducted semi-structured face-to-face in-

terviews with representatives of these companies to

collect data for the characterization study. We consid-

ered the forms published in (Sulayman et al., 2012)

to be adjusted and used in this study

. According to

the conﬁdentially agreement, the identiﬁcation of the

companies were preserved. The goal of the ﬁrst form

was to collect data related to the interviewed proﬁle

representing each company. The second form col-

lected data related to the company. The third form

had the goal to evaluate to which extent the company

was aligned to the seven items proposed by (Dyb

2003) and listed as follows: a) Business orientation:

the extent to which SPI goals and actions are aligned

with explicit and implicit business goals and strate-

gies; b) Involved leadership: the extent to which lead-

ers at all levels in the organization are genuinely com-

mitted to and actively participate in SPI; c) Employee

participation: the extent to which employees use their

The adjusted forms are available at

http://www.sourceminer.org/slrsme.html.

Challenges and Opportunities in the Software Process Improvement in Small and Medium Enterprises: A Field Study

451

knowledge and experience to decide, act, and take re-

sponsibility for SPI; d) Concern for measurement: the

extent to which the software organization collects and

utilizes quality data to guide and assess the effects of

SPI activities; e) Exploitation: the extent to which the

software organization is engaged in the exploitation

of existing knowledge; f) Exploration: the extent to

which the software organization is engaged in the ex-

ploration of new knowledge (Dyb

a, 2003). Finally,

the fourth form aimed at identifying what the organi-

zation had already implemented in terms of software

process improvement.

Proﬁles of the Participants. Nine of the participants

had worked at least three years in the company. On

the other hand, four of the interviewed had worked at

least ﬁve years. Nine of the interviewed were project

managers and the other two took were members of the

software engineering process group.

Proﬁles of the Organizations. Five companies had

developed software for at least ﬁve years, whereas

three companies had operated in the market for at

least ﬁfteen years, two companies had between ﬁve

and ten years. Finally, just one company had less than

ﬁve years. Considering that eight companies had up

to ﬁve professionals, one company had seven profes-

sionals and two companies had more than ten profes-

sionals, we can conclude that there is to some extent

a relationship with Challenge 1 reported in the pre-

vious section - ﬁnancial restrictions and human re-

source constraints and Challenge 3 - small teams with

work overload.

All the companies are located in Feira de Santana

city in the Bahia State of Brazil. Due to the major-

ity of companies with less than ﬁve employees, the

Software Quality process activities, including the au-

dits, can be performed by an external professional.

This leads to the possibility of sharing this profes-

sional among the companies. This is a viable solu-

tion to circumvent the challenge of human resources

constraints. This number of professionals is an is-

sue that should certainly inﬂuence the occurrences of

small teams with work overload - (Challenge 3). This

overload can impact the participation of professionals

in activities related to the SPI such as process elabo-

ration and review as well as training. And participat-

ing in these activities compromise the capacity of the

company in its ongoing projects. This has as a natural

consequence in the increase of natural expenditures.

Regarding the project duration, 55% of the com-

panies reported that their projects end in a maxi-

mum of ten weeks. This is a clear evidence of fo-

cus on small projects. In fact, even working with

software product evolution, these companies tend to

split the activities in small chunks. This was iden-

tiﬁed in (Silva and Carneiro, 2016) as projects with

short time frame (Challenge 2). A possible explana-

tion for this scenario is that the majority of these com-

panies evolve software products for a speciﬁc domain.

Another fact that was identiﬁed during the interviews

was that these companies suffer the inﬂuence of agile

methods, especially Scrum. These approaches some-

how motivate teams to deal with small projects.

4.2 Success Factors in SPI Initiatives

Table 2 presents data related to the third form of the

ﬁeld study focusing on Business Orientation. Data

collected from the ﬁeld study reveal which items from

the Business Orientation were considered relevant by

the companies: 1 - We have established unambiguous

goals for the organizations SPI activities, was men-

tioned by 64% of the companies. Companies devel-

oped their process based on strategic planning and di-

rected/adjusted efforts of SPI aligned with their needs.

Approximately 64% of the companies informed that

our SPI goals are closely aligned with the organiza-

tions business goals. The establishment of goals can

have as a consequence a possible push in business as

a result of SPI initiatives.

Table 2: Success Factors in the Business Orientation Per-

spective.

Activity Practice

1 - We have established unambiguous

goals for the organizations SPI

activities.

64%

2 - There is a broad understanding of

SPI goals and policy within our

organization.

28%

3 - Our SPI activities are closely

integrated with software development

activities.

55%

4 Our SPI goals are closely aligned

with the organizations business

goals.

64%

5 We have a ﬁne balance between

short-term and long-term SPI goals.

09%

Table 3 describes quantitatively how companies

perceive success factors from the Leadership Engage-

ment perspective. A percentage of 73% of the com-

panies inform that the staff actively support SPI activ-

ities. As a natural consequence, the activity 8 Man-

agement considers SPI as a way to increase competi-

tive advantage is recognized by 64% of the companies

to justify investiment in SPI to improve the quality

of software products. On the other hand, 73% of the

companies agree that activity 9 Management is ac-

ICEIS 2016 - 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

452

Table 3: Success Factors in the Leadership Engagement

Perspective.

Activity Practice

6 Management is actively supporting

SPI activities.

73%

7 Management accepts

responsibility for SPI.

55%

8 Management considers SPI as a

way to increase competitive advantage.

64%

9 Management is actively

participating in SPI activities.

73%

10 SPI issues are often discussed in

top management meetings.

45%

tively participating in SPI activities is associated with

the initiatives they have seen in their companies.

Table 4 describes quantitatively how companies

perceive success factors from the Employee Participa-

tion perspective. Activities 11 ( Software developers

are involved to a great extent in decisions about the

implementation of their own work) and 12 - Software

developers are actively contributing with SPI propos-

als were recognized by 73% of the interviewed com-

panies. In that sense, employees recognize that they

are encouraged to suggest changes in projects and

process in the company. Despite being initially not

conﬁdent to provide suggestions, later on they con-

tribute with suggestions related to the SPI activities.

This is corroborated by the fact that 91% of the in-

Table 4: Success Factors (Software Process Improvement)

Employee Participation.

Activity Practice

11 Software developers are involved

to a great extent in decisions about the

implementation of their own work.

73%

12 Software developers are actively

contributing with SPI proposals.

73%

13 Softwaredevelopers are actively

involved in creating routines and

procedures for software development.

91%

14 We have an ongoing dialogue and

discussion about software

development.

64%

15 Software developers have

responsibility related to the

organizations SPI activities.

64%

16 Software developers are actively

involved in setting goals for our SPI

activities.

64%

17 We have an ongoing dialogue

and discussion about.

SPI.

64%

terviewed agreed that 13 Software developers are ac-

tively involved in creating routines and procedures for

software development.

Table 5: Success Factors (Software Process Improvement)

Concern for Measurement.

Activity Practice

18 We consider it important to

measure organizational performance.

64%

19 We regularly collect quality data

(e.g. defects, timeliness) from our

projects.

64%

20 Information on quality data is

readily available to software

developers.

55%

21 Information on quality data is

readily available to management.

55%

22 We use quality data as a basis for

SPI.

55%

23 Our software projects get regular

feedback on their performance.

64%

Table 5 describes quantitatively how companies

perceive success factors from the Concern for Mea-

surement perspective. The majority of the companies

(64%) recognize the relevance of measuring organi-

zational performance as stated by activity 18 ( We

consider it important to measure organizational per-

formance. Software life-cycle activities need to be

measured to evaluate its performance and indicators

are required for this end. Another two activities re-

lated to the measurement perspective were also clas-

siﬁed as relevant by 64% of the companies: 19 - We

regularly collect quality data (e.g. defects, timeliness)

from our projects and 23 - Our software projects get

regular feedback on their performance. The compa-

nies reported that indicators were planned, collected

an later analyzed/compared with their respective tar-

gets. However, they also recognized that there is the

need to improve the way measurement is performed

during software projects life-cycle, especially due to

the effort required to accomplish measurement related

activities.

Table 6 portrays success factors regarding Ex-

ploitation of Existing Knowledge. The following ac-

tivities were recognized by 73% of the companies

25 We are systematically learning from the experi-

ence of prior projects and 26 26 - Our routines for

software development are based on experience from

prior projects. Table 7 focuses on success factors re-

garding Exploitation of New Knowledge. The activi-

ties 31 In our organization, we encourage innovation

and creativity, 34 We have the ability to question es-

tablished truths had both 82% of representation by

Challenges and Opportunities in the Software Process Improvement in Small and Medium Enterprises: A Field Study

453

Table 6: Success Factors (Software Process Improvement)

Exploitation of Existing Knowledge.

Activity Practice

24 We exploit the existing

organizational knowledge to the

utmost extent.

45%

25 We are systematically learning

from the experience of prior projects.

73%

26 Our routines for software

development are based on experience

from prior projects.

73%

27 We collect and classify experience

from prior projects.

36%

28 We put great emphasis on internal

transfer of positive and negative

experience.

55%

29 To the extent we can avoid it, we

do not take risks by experimenting

with new ways of working.

55%

Table 7: Success Factors (Software Process Improvement)

Exploitation of New Knowledge.

Activity Practice

30 We are very capable at managing

uncertainty in the organizations

environment.

36%

31 In our organization, we

encourage innovation and creativity.

82%

32 We often carry out trials with

new software engineering methods

and tools.

45%

33 We often conduct experiments

with new ways of working with

software development.

27%

34 We have the ability to question

established truths.

82%

35 We are very ﬂexible in the way

we carry out our work.

73%

36 We do not specify work processes

more than what are

absolutely necessary.

28%

the participants. They reported that their companies

have encouraged professionals to propose solutions

creatively considering the possibility of rewards.

Finally, the activity 35 We are very ﬂexible in the

way we carry out our work was conﬁrmed by 73%

of the participants that commented that ﬂexibility is

a key factor to face the challenges during software

project development and evolution in the sense that

requirements evolve continuously and the software

product must meet the expectations of clients.

4.3 Software Process Improvement in

Practice

Table 8 presents the results related to process and ac-

tivities that have actually been implemented in the

companies. Table 9 presents the results of the percep-

tion of the companies that took part in the ﬁeld study

regarding the relevance of Software Process Improve-

ment for their business.

Table 8: To what extent the SPI processes/activities listed

in the table below are performed in your organization for

projects?

Activity Practice

37 Motivation for the use of

CMMI and MPS.BR

73%

38 Requirements Engineering 55%

39 Project Management 64%

Table 9: How important do you think are the following SPI

processes/activities for projects in your organization?

Activity Practice

40 Motivation for the use of

CMMI and MPS.BR

73%

41 Requirements Engineering 73%

42 Project Management 64%

An important ﬁnding reported in Tables 8 and 9

was despite the relatively high motivation reported

by the companies to implement well-known refer-

ence models such as CMMI (Chrissis et al., 2011) or

MPS.BR (Montoni et al., 2009), they have not yet pre-

pared for the evaluation. Among the reasons provided

was ﬁnancial restrictions and human resource con-

straints (Challenge 1) of the SLR presented in Section

3. The companies in fact revealed that they need ex-

ternal sponsorship to implement such models to over-

come direct and indirect costs of this initiative. How-

ever, despite these constraints, the companies demon-

strate motivation (Table 9) for the challenge of SPI,

considering both the interviewed professionals and

staff, what is a positive fact to achieve effective re-

sults in this journey.

Limitations of the Characterization Study. Two

possible limitations were identiﬁed in this character-

ization. The ﬁrst was related to the fact that the pro-

ﬁle, number and location of the companies that took

part in the study could somehow prevent the gener-

alization of the results. However, it was veriﬁed that

the proﬁle of the companies in terms of number of

professionals, type, duration and number of software

projects and gross operational income were compat-

ible with the values provided by several references

of Small and Medium Enterprises that work in the

ICEIS 2016 - 18th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

454

area of software development. The second limitation

refers to the number of companies in the characteri-

zation. They correspond to approximately half of the

companies of the region, for that reason, for some ex-

tent they represent a reasonable sampling in terms of

proﬁle. The fact that the majority of the interviewed

professionals (82%) was from staff could had inﬂu-

ence the answers. In a new version of the study we

will select participants from different roles for a better

distribution of proﬁles. However, despite these limi-

tations, we could conﬁrm some of the results from our

systematic literature review such as ﬁnancial restric-

tions and human resource constraints, projects with

short time frame and small teams with work overload.

5 CONCLUSION

This paper presents a characterization of Small and

Medium Enterprises aimed at identifying challenges,

difﬁculties and opportunities in the context of Soft-

ware Process Improvement (SPI). The characteriza-

tion consisted in comparing the results obtained from

a systematic literature review and from a ﬁeld study.

The results present a list of challenges and activities

faced and performed by the companies toward the

software process improvement journey. They can be

a reference for companies that plan to adopt SPI and

researchers that can conduct new studies to compare

this scenario with other small and medium enterprises

experiences.

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